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Kealey’s mood darkened and his brain mumbled something about leaving him the hell alone. But he stepped away from Ellie until she wouldn’t be able to hear him and pressed Answer just the same, with his bloody damn sense of responsibility.
    He suddenly, fervently wished that he was not about to hear the word situation used in a sentence. If Harper said that, it meant his call was about something grave, something he did not want to discuss over an unsecured line.
    “Hello, Jonathan.”
    “Morning, Ryan. How’re things?”
    “I’ve had a good few weeks,” he replied. “How’s Julie?”
    Juliette Harper, Jon’s wife, was seriously injured in the convention center explosion in Baltimore.
    “Recovering nicely,” Harper said. “She’s got a cane but she’s walking on her own.”
    “Glad for her,” Kealey said sincerely. “What can I do for you?”
    “I need to talk to you about a situation,” Harper said.
    Kealey inwardly cursed. Outwardly, he said, “I’m retired. For real, this time. I’m about to buy a house.”
    “Do you remember Victor Yerby?” Harper asked.
    “Yeah. He got reprimanded for frying a warlord’s opium field in Bawri, Afghanistan,” Kealey said with a proud half smile. The man had guts. “Please don’t tell me something’s happened—”
    “Let’s have a face-to-face,” Harper said.
    Crap. Kealey had been assigned to Yerby as an instructor for a week once, to hone his sharpshooting skills. He’d liked and admired the man so much, he took ten days of vacation to train Yerby in return, taking him through all the black-ops tactics a formal, advanced course would have provided, plus a number of secrets it wouldn’t. He knew Yerby was a lone-wolf kind of guy, like Kealey himself, and never expected to hear much news of him after that, but rejoiced when he did. The opium field story was one of his favorites.
    But Kealey knew lone wolves had limited futures. Ultimately they were always arrested, taken hostage, or killed. There was never any other kind of life. Since DHS wasn’t Harper’s bailiwick, Kealey was guessing it was either a hostage situation or the murder of Yerby, something that had international repercussions involving the intelligence community.
    “I’ll be in your office tomorrow morning,” Kealey said.
    “Not soon enough,” Harper replied. “Where’s the nearest airfield?”
    Kealey looked behind him. “About fifty yards from where I’m sitting. Small plane or chopper?”
    “Whichever you like.”
    He surveyed the weedy landing strip and surrounding trees. “I think a chopper will have a better time of it.”
    “I’ll arrange it.”
    “I’ll get the details and send them over,” Kealey told him.
    Kealey was frustrated as he clicked off. A crisis, he could probably ignore. But not the plight of a brother agent. Too many people had helped Kealey, saved his life over the years, for him to be callous.
    He walked back to Ellie. “I would like to buy this place.”
    She smiled.
    “But,” he continued, “it’s going to have to wait a few hours. And I need to borrow your airstrip. Can you give me the address here so I can Google Earth a map to my colleague? And can I leave my car?”
    Nonplussed but gracious about it, she told him his car would be welcome and gave him the information, which he sent over to Harper. The deputy director would send a small chopper out of New Haven, most likely. Something with a maximum range of four hundred miles could make both legs of the trip without stopping to refuel.
    Kealey told Ellie that he didn’t have a check to make a deposit but he noted the woman’s bank information and told her he would transfer funds before the day was out. He said he would trust her to get the paperwork in order while he was away. He didn’t think he would be gone very long.
    “Are you always this impulsive?” she asked.
    “Not by choice,” he laughed. Kealey thought about the many times he had had to make a decision on the fly that